Month: July 2022

#REVIEW: The Boys, Season 3

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television1 Comment

I think this is, in total, my fourth or fifth piece about Amazon Prime’s The Boys, and each time I’ve written about it my enthusiasm for the show has deepened. Well, at this point, the third season has finished– the finale was two days ago– and, well. Go watch this fuckin’ show. I don’t know how else to put it. The show has, three seasons in, so thoroughly outgrown its source material that it isn’t even telling the same story any longer, and that’s not an exaggeration. I went through the differences between the show and the comics with my wife after the finale and it is a lengthy list, not to mention that the show rather comprehensively eliminated any chance of ending the way the comics do this season. And every divergence the show has made from the comics has improved the show. This isn’t like Game of Thrones, which decided to change things from the books by adding more rape.

(And while we’re talking about that, this show is enormously better to its woman characters than the comics ever were.)

I don’t really watch a lot of television, to be honest, so calling this “the best-acted show on TV” is … kinda meaningless coming from me, but I will say that it’s really difficult for me to imagine any show loaded with more acting talent than this one has. I will repeat what I said in my last piece about this show: Antony Starr is one of the most terrifying TV villains I’ve ever encountered, and while the show passed up a couple of chances to kill characters this season, I really do feel like there isn’t anyone that has plot armor. And given where they went with a certain major plot line in the comics that only just started showing up in the show, I wouldn’t even necessarily be surprised if they killed Homelander off early next season to move on to this other thing. Will they do that? Probably not. But not definitely not, and at least one other major character has a death sentence hanging over his head right now.

So, yeah. Three seasons in, we have moved to unapologetic, full-throated endorsement of this show. It’s fantastic. You should be watching it, and I can’t wait for Season Four.

Throw away the whole bucket list

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

We went to the county 4-H Fair today, and for the first time in my life I tried deep-fried Oreos.

I think that it’s probably okay if I die now. Not because they were, like, delicious or anything, but because I have been suffering for the last few hours and I think it’s best if I am never in circumstances where I might put one of those things into my body again.

“Still alive” counts as a circumstance, I think.

Also, I rode a ride with my son, a ride that turned out to have an extra chest belt that I didn’t notice, and when I pointed out to the guy running the ride that there was no universe where the thing was going to fit me, he shrugged and said “You OK?” and then walked away.

I didn’t fall out of the ride, so I guess I was OK, but … is this how we do things now?

In which I almost died but I didn’t so it’s funny instead

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Stories2 Comments

The shower in our bathroom is a two-piece affair, with an overhead rainwater-style showerhead and a second handheld one that’s mounted on a grab bar and fully adjustable. I generally keep both running for the entire time I’m showering, and the handheld gets used as a handheld quite a bit as well, because I am a fat man and as a fat man I have nooks and crannies and such a thing makes the whole hygiene process a lot more complete. There’s also a bench in the shower, which technically was put in there to be sat on but which I mostly use as a way to make my feet and legs easier to wash.

Well, today I was finishing that process up and managed to somehow drop the wand, and a lot of things went wrong very quickly. The first thing I did was to look straight down, as one might expect from someone who had just dropped something. Unfortunately, and I don’t think I could have done this again if my life depended on it, I managed to drop the thing in such a way that it landed pointing directly up. Which means that, while balancing semi-precariously on one foot, I dropped the shower head, started a little bit at the loud noise when it hit the tile floor, had time to think oh, shit, I hope I didn’t break anything, then looked down, to be surprised by a rather intense blast of water coming up from the floor and directly into my face.

Telling this story, I feel like it shouldn’t have surprised me to get water in my face while showering, but the direction was unexpected, y’know? You don’t expect the floor to spray you when you’re showering, unless you’re in a much more complicated shower than I was in.

And my surprised reaction to that led directly to being flat on my ass in the shower a second or two later, wondering what the hell had just happened. I then, in rapid succession, went from ow to did I break anything to did I break part of the shower to it would be super to explain what had happened if I’d landed on the shower head, because no one would ever believe that story, ever.

And that led to a mental apology to my wife, because if I had managed to break a bone on the way down– I’m not quite old enough to be worried about breaking a hip in a fall or anything but who the hell knows– my son was in the house but it was going to be several hours until he noticed he hadn’t seen me in a while, and my phone wasn’t going to be reachable without crawling across the shower, and one way or another there is no way I’m allowing any EMTs in the bathroom with me until I’ve managed to put some underwear on, which was also not especially reachable, so I’d probably have just decided to die instead.

But none of that happened, so I thought Okay, there’s today’s blog post sorted, dragged myself up to my feet and finished my shower.

The end.

This post is for you

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I need novelty. Recommend some stuff.

46.0027

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I had a few microwave burritos for lunch, a meal that once I was done with it required me to not only change my shirt, but to wash my face and arms.

Go away, 46, nobody invited you.

(Also, I just opened up the section of this page where I choose categories and enter tags, and I swear to you I was about to put in “Saturday” as a tag. It is Wednesday.)

46

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I have taken worse selfies, I guess.

I’m also going to keep telling the internet to send me birthday money until it actually happens. C’mon, one of y’all take the hit. Somebody out there has to have more money than sense. 🙂

I have spent my birthday recording a Platinum Trophy Guide for Return of the Obra Dinn and reading. It is hotter– or at least more humid– than Satan’s asscrack outside and I just dispatched my wife to Long John Silver’s for dinner, mostly because neither of us feels like cooking and the boy has been begging for it lately. It occurs to me that on a day like today working at Long John Silver’s might literally be the worst job in existence, so I apologize to those poor fryer-burnt bastards for anything they’ve experienced today. It has, truth be told, been a fairly regular day, which … well, 46 ain’t exactly a milestone year. 45 went pretty well, at least personally, even if the entire world went to hell. In an ideal world this next year is as good for me mentally and physically as last year was for me financially.

We shall see. On to 47, I suppose.

A couple of reviews

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Return of the Obra Dinn (PS4, played on PS5) was recommended to me on Twitter as a neat little mystery game that might be up my alley. I am fond of indie games that have unique looks to them, and I certainly haven’t played anything that looks like this in quite a while. For about the first half-hour or so, I hated it. The game is very obscure at first about exactly what is going on at any given moment and what you’re supposed to be doing, and the initial learning curve is steep. I beat it today after just over nine hours. The reason I didn’t post yesterday is because I sat down after dinner intending to just play a little bit and the next thing I knew it was 10:30 and my wife was asking me if I had any plans to come to bed.

The premise: It is 1807. You are … well, you’re an insurance agent, as ridiculous as that might sound, and the Obra Dinn, which had gone missing, has shown up at port in England, with all hands dead or missing. Your job is to find out what happened to them, using a weird little magic pocket watch to jump into specific moments in the past. There are 60 people to identify, between the crew and a small handful of passengers, and you must identify everyone on board and determine how they died. You have access, eventually, to all of the moments where anyone died, and you have to piece together clues using their jobs, ethnicities, associations on the ship, and dress to figure out who everyone is, and sometimes you need to trace someone back through moments of other people’s lives to figure out what happened to them.

It’s fucking fascinating. I’m going to play through it again to record a guide over the next few days. The game is four years old, so no one really needs a guide right now, there are plenty out there, but I’m going to enjoy explaining how clever I am.

Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World was also a Twitter recommend, and I started reading it the same night I started playing Obra Dinn, and so the night before I was up too late playing a video game, I was up reading the first half of a book and didn’t get to bed properly until past midnight. This is the cover to my edition but the quotes are different; mine describes the book as a cross between True Crime and Inception, and that’s about as accurate a description for the book as I could possibly imagine. It starts off as a rather gruesome police procedural/murder mystery and then before you know it Sweterlitsch has worked in time travel and the literal end of the world and “thin places” between universes and holy shit it’s a mindfuck.

This book is currently on my shortlist for the best books of 2022; I’m not a hundred percent certain it’s going to stay there, as it’ll depend on how well the book sticks with me. The first 2/3 or so are amazing and, again, I was up too late reading and blew through half of it the first time I picked it up, but one of two things happens toward the end and I’m genuinely not sure which: either Sweterlitsch sort of loses control of his narrative a bit, which has gotten quite complicated by the end, or my tendency to not be the universe’s most careful reader got the better of me and hurt the rush to the end a little bit. Or, entirely possible, both happened, but one way or another the worst thing I can say about this book is that 2/3 of it is phenomenal and it doesn’t quite stick the ending, which I figure is still worth a recommendation.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of days. I no longer celebrate the Fourth of July, so we haven’t done anything America-related today, although my birthday is tomorrow so we had my birthday dinner tonight. I am full of pork chops and mashed potatoes and sheet cake. ‘Twas a good day.

It is Saturday

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

My wife is back home, finally, and I literally took her on a tour of our house once she’d had a chance to decompress and take a shower so that I could make sure that she knew where I had moved everything during my week-long reign of cleaning and reorganizing terror. I have taken care of some things in the last few days that have bothered both of us for half a decade or more. There will be no pictures just yet, but they’re coming, I promise.

That’s all I’ve got, really. We spent most of the rest of the day sitting around and staring. I’m going to play one of the Video Games. You may have heard of the concept before. Video games and ice water for the rest of the night.